Browsed byAuthor: Brian

Brian graduated with his BA in English and now works in the professional writing industry. He likes poetry, Adam's peanut butter, yoga, meditation, pineapple, hiking, and Avery. He and Avery have been married for a little over a year and enjoy analyzing movies and reading together during long drives.

Our apartment is so small that I had to squeeze my desk (acquired for free from moving neighbors) into the narrow space between our bed and the bedroom wall, which means I use our bed as an office chair.…

When author Brian Doyle visited the campus of BYU–Idaho last December, he shared stories and a lot of dynamite writing advice. Much of that advice has stayed with me, but with NaNoWriMo 2016 behind us and plenty of editing ahead of us, one piece of Doyle’s advice feels especially applicable: “Jazz your verbs.” …

A while ago, my dad lent me a book called I’m Proud of You: My Friendship with Fred Rogers. It’s a memoir by Tim Madigan, an award winning journalist who was sent by his newspaper to interview Fred Rogers, the host of the legendary children’s television show Mr. Rogers. What Tim Madigan found was that Fred Rogers was in real life the kind, gentle, loving man who children saw on TV. But more than that, Tim found an unexpected friendship with Fred that lasted until Fred’s death in 2005. …

Recently, one of my co-workers beckoned me and another coworker over to his desk where he showed us a commercial for the new Microsoft Surface Studio. I was amazed by its processing power, vivid screen, and intimate interface. If there is anything more astonishing than technology, it is how fast our technology advances.

After watching the video, I went back to my desk, where, off to the side, lay my writing notebook and one of my fountain pens. They looked a lot less cool than they had three minutes earlier. …

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is just around the corner. All your writing friends are researching and brainstorming for the novels they will be writing, and you want to participate too. But there’s just one problem: you’re a poet, not a novelist. Of course, you’ll get to celebrate National Poetry Month in April, but that is still a long way off. …

As we drive into Beaver Dick Park, we see paper signs taped up: “Writers this way.” This is a meetup of three local writing groups. Avery has been following one of them on Facebook, but this is the first time we’ve participated in one of their events. …

A couple months ago, Avery and a few of our book-nerdy friends roped me into doing a book group with them. Ian and Seth had already read Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson for a class they took a while back, but they wanted to go through it again with us. It’s not a book I would have readily picked up on my own, but I’m grateful our little book group got me out of my comfort zone. …

I work as a content writer for a company in Lewisville, Idaho, population 476. Each day I end my hour-long lunch break with a twenty-minute walk around the neighborhood. I get some sun, some exercise, and I get to read. I started “read-walking,” as I call it, several years ago while walking to my contemporary literature class. As an English major, I generally had more to read than I thought possible, especially for a slow reader like me, so I crammed in a few extra pages every day as I walked. Even on snowy winter days I would read, clumsily turning pages with gloved hands, occasionally wiping snowflakes away from the paper. …